Putin's butterflies

Back in 1968, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones were put on trial for drug offences.  The judge chose to throw the book at them, which prompted a memorable editorial in The Times.  The paper's editor, William Rees-Mogg, is nobody's idea of a bleeding heart, but he was appalled at the severity of the sentences, and chose to quote the words of a poem by Alexander Pope: "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?".   Rees-Mogg's words had the desired effect, and thereafter the UK authorities increasingly turned a blind eye to minor drug transgressions by rock stars.  (This didn't stop Keef from getting into a similar scrape in Toronto a few years later, but that's another story).

Rees-Mogg, though very advanced in years,   is still with us, but apparently Vladimir Putin has not been taking his advice recently. The "Pussy Riot" trial, and the jail sentences handed to the three young women for their tawdry piece of attention-seeking in a Moscow cathedral, have led to an outpouring of anger in Russia and around the world.  If it hadn't been for the trial, the whole episode would have been forgotten months ago.  Now it stands to be a touchstone for a rising tide of protests against Putin in the coming months, even if he decides to exercise his prerogatives as President to commute the two-year jail sentences.  

As an ex-KGB man,  Putin is no liberal.  Even so,  attempts to paint him as some sort of Stalin redux show little sense of history.  Not many of Stalin's numberless victims had the benefit of a trial, even a show trial, or ended up spending time in prison rather than being bundled into a mass grave.

And if we accept that Putin may not be a nice man, we should perhaps also allow that the members of Pussy Riot are no angels.  The great and good of the rock world (and Madonna*) have rallied to their cause.  Peter Gabriel wrote after the trial that he understood that the three women were all believers, and sincere about their faith.  Given what they did, that seems unlikely: staging a political protest in front of the altar of a cathedral is a stunt designed to shock and offend, and if the Pussy Riot trio are even half as religious as Peter Gabriel imagines them to be, they must surely have known that.  The jail sentence is a draconian punishment, but this was no innocent prank. Think they would have tried something similar in a mosque?

* Madonna's intervention, at a concert in Moscow, prompted one of Putin's supporters to utter one of the insults of the decade:  "Madonna", said he, "should either take of the cross or put on her knickers".